This article examines how economic shocks affect individual
well-being in developing countries. Using the case of a sudden
and unanticipated currency devaluation in Botswana as a
quasi-experiment, the article examines how this monetary
shock affects individuals’ evaluations of well-being. This is
done by using microlevel survey data, which—incidentally—
were collected in the days surrounding the devaluation.
The chance occurrence of the devaluation during the time
of the survey enables us to use pretreatment respondents,
surveyed before the devaluation, as approximate counterfactuals
for post-treatment respondents, surveyed after
the devaluation. Estimates show that the devaluation had
a large and significantly negative effect on individuals’
evaluations of subjective well-being. These results suggest
that macroeconomic shocks, such as unanticipated currency
devaluations, may have significant short-term costs
in the form of reductions in people’s sense of well-being.

This paper examines how economic shocks affect individual well-being in developing
countries. Using the case of a sudden and unanticipated currency devaluation in
Botswana as a quasi-experiment, we examine how this monetary shock affects
individuals’ evaluations of well-being. We do so by using micro-level survey data,
which – incidentally – was collected in the days surrounding the devaluation. The
chance occurrence of the devaluation during the time of the survey enables us to use
pre-treatment respondents, surveyed before the devaluation, as approximate
counterfactuals for post-treatment respondents, surveyed after the devaluation. Our
estimates show that the devaluation had a large and significantly negative effect on
individuals’ evaluations of subjective well-being. These results suggest that
macroeconomic shocks, such as unanticipated currency devaluations, may have
significant short-term costs in the form of reductions in people’s sense of well-being.

This paper consists of Carsten Greve’s inaugrial lecture as new professor with special responsibilities for the areas public-private relationships and public management. First, the talk gives a view of how public-private partnerships have been defined in the literature. Then the talk focuses on the business of PPPs, including the way markets develop and are structured. The talk moves on to focus on the politics of PPPs, including the political processes in forming a policy on PPPs. The talk then discusses the interrelationship between business and politics within a political economy framework and institutional theory. The talk ends by considering the international perspective and the comparative research agenda. The conclusions highlight the research challenges for the future which include examining the stability and change in the use of market mechanisms in the delivery of public services in a historical-institutional perspective.

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The Bank for International Settlements (BIS) is the premiere international institution for the regulation of the world’s financial system. Originally established to handle German reparations payments, the BIS’s contemporary role is to provide global standards for prudential bank regulation and to facilitate information sharing among a range of state and non-state actors. While privately incorporated and underwritten by its member central banks, the BIS is fundamentally a service provider with quasi-non-governmental organization, ‘quango’, status. This paper traces the evolution of this unique international quango, stressing the development of the Basle Accords of 1988 and 2004, and how the BIS uses informal and formal networks of elite policymakers to create a normative consensus that compensates for its lack of formal enforcement mechanisms.

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Over the last three decades, business news has become an area of growth in most industrialized countries. This report, which is part of a Nordic research project on the rise of the business press, describes how the field of business news production has evolved in Denmark. Based on a large quantitative analysis of news content in two Danish dailies, "Berlingske Tidende" and "Børsen", the report first shows how a market for business news has developed, and then shows how the volume of business news has expanded and the content features and formats of business news have changed with the development of the field. The analysis suggests that with the expansion of business news a dual process of professionalization and popularization of business journalism has occurred.

Much of the literature in political economy seeks to capture an essential insight into the evolution of political and economic systems to provide a foundation for policy advice. This article suggests that attempts to nut out the kernels of change often restrict rather than expand policy imagination. Three "fevers" are identified as involved in the narrowing of policy imagination and two "tonics" are offered to widen it. The three fevers are: 1. viewing the present as natural; 2. seeing history as overtly path dependent; and 3. viewing history as driven by "Great Men". These fevers limit our capacity to see political, social, and economic changes that do not conform to conventional theories, as well as distorting our understanding of how the contemporary world works. What policymakers want, more than prediction or recitation of conventional theories, is context to understand how policy can be implemented. Historical sociology provides a way to generate information about contextual constellations through two "tonics": intentional rationality and social mechanisms. With the assistance of these tonics, historical sociology widens political economy's policy imagination.

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This paper confronts the question of what a revitalized financial sector might look like if this were to be reconfigured so as to reproduce first an artisanal like persona for the financial analyst and craft like organizational structure for financial businesses, and secondly if this were to be re-territorialized so that it acted like a partisan rather than, as at present, like a disembedded footloose structure of ‘global finance’. Initially the analysis is pitched at a rather abstract and theoretical level – pulling together artisans, nomads and partisans and tracing their intellectual lineages. But the chapter ends with three very concrete illustrations of actual financial relations in practice that meet some of the criteria for being both artisanal and partisanal.

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The International Monetary Fund and Policy Reform Surveillance in Small Open Economies

Seabrooke, Leonard; Broome, André(København, 2006)

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[Færre oplysninger]

Resume:

The International Monetary Fund spends most of its time monitoring its member states' economic performance and advising on institutional change. While much of the literature sees the Fund as a policy enforcer in "emerging market" and "frontier" economies, little attention has been paid to exploring the Fund’s bilateral surveillance of its Western member states. This article proposes that "seeing like the IMF" provides a dynamic view of how the Fund frames its advice for institutional change. It does so through "associational templates" that do not blindly promote institutional convergence, but appeal for change on the basis of like-characteristics among economies. Many Western states, particularly small open economies, consider the Fund's advice as important not only for technical know-how, but because Fund assessments are significant to international and domestic political audiences. This article traces the Fund's advice on taxation and monetary reform to two coordinated market economies, Denmark and Sweden, and two liberal market economies, Australia and New Zealand from 1975 to 2004. It maps how the Fund advocated "policy revolutions" and "policy recombinations" during this period, advice that coincided with important institutional changes within these small open economies.

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Many formulations of contemporary globalization suggest that citizenship is being radically transformed by processes of transnationalism. And the business world is reacting to this sense of change by firms claiming to be ‘global corporate citizens’. But what exactly does global corporate citizenship mean and what are its implications? In this paper a preliminary response is made to these questions by situating corporate citizenship within the wider framework of constitutional debates about private economic law and the juridicalization of the international sphere more generally. The paper poses the issue of whether there is a quasi-constitutionalization of the international corporate sphere underway and the possible governance consequences of this process.

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This paper examines the role of social capital (trust) vis-à-vis the propensity of a country to be a tax
haven. The empirical analysis corroborates that better governed countries have a higher ceteris paribus
probability to be tax havens. However, social capital counteracts the effect of governance quality. This
effect is so strong that the partial effect of governance quality is reversed for countries with the trust
index in the top quartile – making these high trust countries less likely to be tax havens – even as
governance quality is increased. Thus it is crucial to consider the interaction between institutions and
social capital, since the same governance institutions have a different impact on the tax haven
propensity for countries with different social capital.

The present article investigates co-decision making with focus on the development of partnerships arrangements (PAs) between managers and trade-union representatives in a Danish multinational company which has grown through cross-border mergers and acquisitions. The findings show the difficulties which trade-union representatives and management face in combining different forms of corporate governance and supporting PAs. The article argues that hybrid forms of PAs are unlikely to develop, due to historically embedded governance institutions, which create distinct expectations about how a firm must be controlled and who has the rights to exert this control.